Sense
by Nightengale13
Summary: A series of short reflections on Dorothy's unfolding and faceted world, specifically the part of her world which pertains to Roger. Each chapter is based on or contains specific reflection on one of the Acts. More chapters will be forthcoming.
1. Scent

9-2-02  
Scent  
  
The idea first came to her as she watched a silver zipper resting on bouncy breasts, pink-clad eager thighs, and a sultry voice turn his eyes to frosted glass. She tore up the resulting business card in a fit of jealousy, the most feminine emotion known to humans. This was ironic considering she felt anything but feminine.  
  
She waited until he had left the mansion, off to rescue that desolate town full of creatures which had decided to be ungrateful of the electric wonders of modern man. She herself decided to be ungrateful of the way black embroidery accentuated her shapely crimson-clad waist.  
  
She sifted through his armoire like a real lady would though a catalog, searching for a new look, "a new you!" She really didn't have much of a selection, seeing as the only variable was how well-worn his socks--black, of course--were.  
  
She cursed her maker as the borrowed trousers puddled around her ankles, the jacket slouched over her thin shoulders. She looked like a little boy dressed up in Daddy's clothes, because he's all grown up now. She snugged the white-striped silken noose around her frail neck.  
  
"All grown up. How silly," she mused at the mirror.  
  
She shoved back the cuff of the jacket and balled up a section of too-long shirtsleeve in her palm. With rough, angry gestures, she scrubbed the black and blue tint from around her eyes, leaving the shirt cuff looking bruised, and her face looking...well...  
  
asexual.  
  
She realized, with a heavy permanence to the thought, that she could pass for a prepubescent child of either sex, or, as appropriate in her case, neither.  
  
Prepubescent indeed. The term turned her mind from questions of gender to issues of attraction, and she suddenly realized exactly how intoxicating his scent was. Surrounded by soft, weighty fabrics, she carefully considered what these garments usually enclosed...how smoothly the tight skin of his back would glide along the inside of the pressed oxford now draped about her...how with a sigh the woolen jacket would slip onto his shoulders and powerful arms...how the calm satin of his tie could wrap its arms around his neck, hug him gently...but most of all she reveled in the scent of him.  
  
The young woman in man's clothing toddled over to the edge of his bed, despite the best efforts of the overly long trousers, and pondered why her body was warmed by being engulfed in this smell. She brought her hands, enfolded in pliable, crisp cloth as they were, to her face, and deeply inhaled. She pondered rhetorically how her olfactory analyzers knew how to make her neck weak and her arms heavy, how to make them long to be supported and wrapped around the proper inhabitant of the suit.  
  
She laid down on the bed, bringing her knees up to her face; another unknown, she pondered, concerned why the assumption of such a position was so inherently soothing. But as it was of minor import to the grand scheme of things as reflected in her eyes, she tucked the issue away in the back of her head, and whatever electronic paraphernalia contained therein, until she encountered a gray-sky morning with nothing to do.  
  
Back to the scent...which as she focused on it, intensified until it threatened to drug her to unconsciousness. This heady feeling...this lethargy...this lack of desire to do anything to prevent her drowning in its warmth...  
  
  
***  
  
He was stopped by the butler on his way inside.  
  
"Sir, I would advise you she has conducted another experiment..."  
  
Mildly perplexed, he made his way down the hall, dismissing the butler's statement before he was half the distance to his room, meanwhile deciding that forgoing dinner altogether in favor of a long night's sleep would be a comfortable course of action.  
  
Strangely, the first thing he noticed was her left big toe, pointing straight at him from within the generous folds of his trousers. Her hair was a bloodstain on the black sheets. Her dress, tights, slip, cravat, brooch on the floor were casualties of war, left where they'd fallen with nary a backward glance.  
  
He neared the bed cautiously, already trying to discern why she would dress in his attire. He sat down on the bed next to her, studying her features. Her eyes were twisted shut, tightest at the corners, as if someone had gathered the fabric of her face at that point and knotted it. Her lips were slightly parted, the tip of her tongue peeking out to taste the air. Her...her face was utterly white. He noticed with a start that her signature black and blue eyeshadow, if that it could be called, was missing. Her hands were tightly clenched at her breast, and only the knuckles poked out of the oversized jacket sleeves.  
  
  
  
For what would not be the last time, he wondered if she could cry.  
  
  
  
  
He slid his hands under her shoulder, lifting up enough to wedge his arm under her heavy waist. He raised her enough to slide her shoulders onto his lap, and cradled her head in his hands, stroking her hair with a thumb. In a few minutes she woke enough to bring her hands back up to her face, and inhaled deeply of his essence. He misunderstood, construing her deep breath as a weary sigh, and ran a gloved hand over her cheek to console her.  
  
Her eyes snapped open, and, seeing nothing in front of her, looked up into his upside down face. His expression brightened in an attempt at comfort, but mortification needs no assurance. She sat bolt upright, tucking her legs under her in the process, and looked, wide-eyed, at him.  
  
She felt so vulnerable. Not only had she fallen asleep on his bed, in his room, in his clothes, he had laid her head on his lap as a pillow...on his lap...  
  
The scent that was so inherently him overwhelmed her. It wisped from the clothes she wore, permeated the whole room with its faintly ambient presence, but mostly, flew from him. He, sitting on the bed next to her, he, so intoxicatingly sweet-smelling, he, he...  
  
He stood up, walked over to the pile of her clothes. Picked up her slip. "It's white." Held it to his face, breathed deeply of the scent of her, of dusting cloths and soap suds and confusion.  
  
As he pulled it from his features, he smiled.  
  
His eyes were frosted glass.  
  
  
  
Some part of her mind tucked away the conclusion that cracked like lightning so fast in front of her face: she could now perceive a way by which she didn't need to be pink or bouncy.  
  
He recrossed the room to stand in front of her. She didn't know what he intended, but knew she could not remain much longer under his obsidian gaze without suffering liquefaction. Moreover, she knew that she would be unable to tear herself from his presence without one last arrogated boon. So, slowly, she stood, tripping a bit on the damnèd hems, and leaned forward into him, burying her nose under the lapel of his jacket, wrapping her arms tight around him.  
  
They stayed that way for a while, he with arms at his sides, looking down at her with a strange light of comprehension behind his still-glazed eyes, she with carmine locks tangled in inky eyelashes, mouth and nose only existing for the intoxicating, drunken feeling birthed in her by being near to him, her body functioning merely by breathing his warmth.  
  
Presently she broke away, molasses-slow, depriving herself of her nirvanah, and gathered up her garments. She caressed his fingers one by one, coaxing them into releasing her slip from their grasp, carefully keeping her embarrassed gaze downcast. He neither helped nor hindered her, aware that his composed silence was bewildering her, but powerless and unwilling to shake off the drugged state of his brain induced by her scent.  
  
As she reached the doorway, he finally spoke.  
  
"You can keep the suit if you'd like..." He smiled bemusedly at her.  
  
She had thought her surrogate heart had felt the apex of humiliation known to the true human breast, but now discovered how deeply she was in error. Busy trying to reason away the thudding ersatz rhythm that seemed to make her tie dance, she found presence of mind to make a small bow and stand rigidly back up, terrified of herself, of this over-ambitious heart of hers. She walked gingerly and with measured steps from the room, and for as long as she, retreating down the hall, remained in his field of vision, she retained her ramrod-straight posture.  
  
  
  
Once safely beyond his gaze, she brought two fistfuls of fragrant material to her face and breathed deeply, seeing only his frosted-glass eyes as she returned to her room.  
  
  
-fin-  
  
  
  
  
  
AN: I started this at eleven at night, and finished around one-thirty. I am insanely proud of it; please be kind, but honest. Miss Dorothy does not visit me often; when she does, I do my best to capture every inch of red dress I can. Tell me how I can catch more. 


	2. Sound

11-19-02  
Sound  
*AN: Based on A Legacy of Amadeus*  
  
Fight fire with fire, or so the old adage runs. But neither R. Dorothy Wayneright, nor the entire city of Paradigm, had heard it. No matter-the tongues menacing her knight in dirty armor at that point were not of flame, but of sound, shredding sound which was slowly disassembling the Big O and pounding mercilessly on his mind. She stood, helpless, in the cut-away house, like a doll in a diorama, frozen in a plebeian action, a demonstration of everyday life. And this was indeed her daily routine-she had become quite accustomed to standing on the sidelines, watching his life be threatened, watching him let his armor, his protection, his megadeus, slowly be sawed at around the edges like a gradually fraying rope. The cord had never yet been fully broken, and it was always restored to full strength by Norman just in time for each successive battle, but these facts did nothing to alleviate her distress. She could only stand observant, internally writhing with concern but being unfamiliar with human manifestations of the emotion such as twisting one's fingers into knots.  
  
She stared intently at the struggle for a moment, then averted her gaze. Being a practiced megadeus-watcher, she could tell which one was winning and which was losing. He was losing.  
  
She looked pointlessly at her hands.  
  
At that moment, she mused, Roger's hands held the throttles of the Big O tightly, and their palms in his leather gloves were soaked with sweat. Instro's, in the process of compelling the sonic beast to indirectly destroy her soul, were articulating in ways more violent than they'd ever been intended. He was destined to be a musician, not a warrior. But that madman...that madman had created a monster out of a pianist...  
  
A pianist! Perhaps she could help with this battle. Quickly she seated herself at the piano, and without further ado began playing. Her knowledge of acoustics and the carriage of sound down hillsides was limited, but she could hope that if she pressed as hard as she could, on every note, maybe, just maybe, Instro would hear and heed. She dared not glance back at the battle for fear her efforts were ineffectual; instead, she kept playing, and pressed each ivory, every ebony, even harder. She felt a sense of urgency of deed unknown to her since the subway, and had she been human it would have swelled in her chest and throat enough to cause her to choke with the fear. Still she played on.   
  
She was waking Roger up, she was waking Instro up, she was saving Roger from the final sleep she feared he faced in the form of his friend. For the first time she truly realized how easily he might be taken from her, how simple it would be for the shrieking sounds emanating from Instro's megadeus to make him bleed, make him weep, make him fall as Soldano had. Thoughts such as these, had she been human, may have caused her to cease playing and run to the edge of the fissured floor, to scream his name for all the eternity contained in the cold gray sky and desolate forest to hear. But as she was neither human nor weak, she only played on, pressing her very soul into every keystroke, pedaling the chords to hang and clamour out over the hill, into the audio receptors of Instro, to save her incarnate dream.  
  
She abruptly became aware that she no longer needed to fight to be heard above cacophonous battle clangs. She continued playing as she turned to look over her shoulder. Instro was holding his megadeus immobile, listening intently to her melodic spell. Roger emerged in time from his cockpit and began talking to Instro, but she couldn't hear the words. The distance and distortion of sound by the wind was not an issue for her; it was mere function for her audio receptors to distinguish even the most garbled of human speech. But her mind's desire to decipher his words was powerless to her heart's obligation to merely listen to the music he wove with his voice. Sometime between then and the final destruction of Instro's hands, she stopped playing; somewhere within the space of time in which Roger rebuked his friend for that action, she stopped thinking; somewhere within the millisecond in which the sonic walking-stick was leveled at her she realized that though she had saved his fragile life, hers was in jeopardy as well.  
  
In the moment after that, when the husk of a long-dead tree crushed Instro's master, the sound it created was the most beautiful she had yet heard. She, though impervious to most things, had just been spared that which would have succeeded in tearing her as brutally away from Roger as Instro had detached his own hands.  
  
In the moments and days after that, she demoted the tree's crash to her second-most-beautiful sound. First place now and forever became filled by his voice. His voice, his laugh, his chuckle, any sound he made, she treasured, because it was made by him, and he was alive, and he had beaten the odds again, and her daily routine had closed with its regular ending, instead of with snow falling on spilt blood, and she was still functioning and able to hear him, and all was well with her world.  
  
Of course, she indicated none of this by her expression, as she was unfamiliar with human manifestations of exhilaration such as giddy laughter or reckless, impetuous kisses. Instead she merely stood by Instro at the piano bench and listened to the music, and all that it had saved. 


	3. Sight

9-11-02  
Sight  
  
*AN: this is heavily based on episode 11, Dæmonseed; you'll have to remember the kitchen scenes to fully understand this.*  
  
  
She lifted a hanger off the rack, letting her fingers glide over the polished pine, wondering briefly how much more tactile the surface would feel to a real human. Carefully, she placed shoulders of the coat on the wood, brushing a small fleck of debris off its lapel before returning the finished unit to her closet. The left sleeve was hanging at a slightly irregular angle, which bothered her, and impulsively she adjusted it. Perfect-as militarily correct as her own impeccable posture.  
  
-you know how love just happens; you've felt that, haven't you?-  
  
She visibly started, unnerved by the painful, unbidden memory. How should she know what love was? How could she be sure that what she felt was truly love? How could she have honestly answered Laura's question, being who she was?  
  
Being what she was.  
  
-Now, you two make a great couple!-  
  
"Oliver, you've got the wrong idea!"  
  
No! No...it did no good to dwell on that louse's comments. He never did consider her feelings; the elevator, at the table, but especially then. Dismissing out-of-hand the mere possibility of her being in a romantic relationship, for in essence that was what he had done. But, she reflected, I'm used to it.  
  
Oliver...Oliver and Laura...they seemed so happy together, and probably were. She realized the humor in their situation: Oliver based his relationship with Laura on lies, or at least undermined it with such. And Laura still loved him, even though she knew he fooled her all the time...even though she knew he loved her at least in part because he could fool her.  
  
Without sight...Laura, she realized, had no idea what Oliver looked like, yet still loved him. Knew she was fooled by him, yet still loved him.  
  
She closed her eyes, trying to envision an existence without sight. What would one miss out on? She began listing items, objects: Her mop...the horrid weight-limit sign in that elevator...the muddy footprints constantly deposited on newly-waxed floors...his face when he laughed at her questions...his eyes when he smirked knowingly at her, safely assured of the fact that he had confused her again...his eyes when...  
  
"Do-ro-th-y-"  
  
Another unbidden recollection, this one more painful than the last, this one of the weighted, mournful look in his eyes as he gazed on her, trapped in her embrace...trapped in a sickly, malicious parody of the embrace she longed to give him...the words she longed to say...  
  
His eyes.  
  
Blind, she would never look on them, nor his tousled hair and petulant features as he stormed out of his bedroom. She would never see his swagger, the way his hips moved just -so- as he walked, confidently settled in his oyster named Paradigm. She would never see...him.  
  
How could Laura stand fetters such as that? How could she bear never seeing the one she adored so?  
  
-I'm so easy to fool...-  
  
Was that it? Heaven's Day was not her birthday, yet he bought her a present anyway...but...then, knowing that it was not in fact her birthday, he still gave her the present...  
  
Will you be giving anyone a present, Roger Smith?  
  
"Preposterous!"  
  
Was...was she being fooled? Appearances are deceiving, all the more so to one who lacked a full grasp of human talents such as sarcasm and intonation. He laughed so easily at her questions...he did tend to answer a bit obliquely...especially that last...why else would he have been so uncomfortable? Why else...  
  
If you and I had no memories, and we met, would we fall in love?  
  
Would indeed. She closed her eyes, and conjured his face to her mind's eye. His countenance rested impassive, the barest quirk of his eyebrow betraying her own doubts. She raised a mental hand, determined to remove his coy, misleading features, and determine the thoughts behind his words. Seemingly sensing her intent, the imagined Roger began trying to distract her, winking, smiling, smirking-now slipping sunglasses on and turning his profile to her, now looking at her as if her hand were on one of his beloved hourglasses. Finding it hard to keep her attention focused on her task and ignore the gleam of his hair, the spark in his smile as he winningly grinned at her, she finally glared at the image long enough to get it to sit still. Now relieved of the challenge of trying to hit a moving (and sexy) target, she slowly, slowly raised an imaginary hand, and began sliding the palm along his features.   
  
One by one, she wiped every aspect out of existence...his strong jawline, his slim nose, his hair...his...she paused, watching his eyes take on the aspect they had when he was in her arms and she was in Beck's control. Their trick almost worked-she all but abandoned her resolve. Gritting her porcelain teeth just a bit, not nearly enough to make them squeak (so where was that noise coming from?) she lifted a mental thumb and laid it over the obsidian jewels. A quick, determined motion wiped them from her mind's eye. She suddenly felt rather lonely.  
  
She left herself one thing, one anchor: his voice. She looked into the blackness of the back of her eyelids, and began to replay his comments of the day.  
  
"There's no logic to my behavior. It comes from emotions you wouldn't understand."  
  
Or would she? Perhaps he was trapped in the same misconception she was...perhaps that explained the weakly cynical look in his eyes as she embraced him too tightly.  
  
"You've got the wrong idea!"  
  
Had he flushed? But she had no face, no features to look at now, so relied only on his intonation...that little gasp as he began speaking...  
  
"I'm about to do something a little out of character."  
  
Bemused, possibly, at himself, his voice was happy, glad to be doing what he was.  
  
"Here, Dorothy. I wish you a happy birthday."  
  
And this is for you, Roger. I got you a present. Merry Heaven's Day, Roger.  
  
She sat for a while, her eyes blissfully closed, listening to words only she could hear. Her lips moved in a hypnotic rhythm, tracing the outline of words she had once said, but could not again utter unless strengthened by an outside force-be it diadem or other beast...  
  
or that odd impulse Laura named love. 


End file.
